JEROME KUGAN

JEROME KUGAN (b. 1975, Sabah, Malaysia) is a writer, musician, and artist. While he has had no formal training as a visual artist, he has previously shown his works in both traditional and non-traditional media in group exhibitions such as Art For Grabs (Epic Understatements, 2017; Talismans, 2016; Catological, 2016; and With Closed Eyes, 2013), The Annexe Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2009, 2010) and Reka Art Space (2003, 2005).

His previous solo exhibitions include: Pondan Nation, RUANG by Think City (in conjunction with Urbanscapes as part of #ReimagineUs), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2018); and Red & Gold, RAW Art Space, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2017).

The Internalised Self series

JEROME KUGAN: MAKING QUEER ART

How does one make queer art? It’s a question I’m still trying to figure out. But drawing on my experiences as an co-organiser of queer events including Seksualiti Merdeka (with Pang Khee Teik, Angela Kuga Thas, Lim Chung Wei, Thilaga Sulatireh, et al) and Rainbow Rojak; interactions with other queer- identifying individuals within the community, especially the trans artist Shika and drag queen Shelah (performed by Edwin Sumun); and my own personal experience as a cis gay man who has never identified with the gay community because of my rejection of the mainstreaming/sanitizing/dilution of queer concerns/issues/identities as an act that disempowers and displaces the LGBT community as a whole.

It’s my personal belief, that queer transgression although it should remain open to discourse, must be loyal to what makes it different from the heteronormative. But how to translate these ideas visually in a way that can be accepted in conservative and heteronormative Malaysia, without resorting to verbose queerspeak?

I chose to address erasure/ambiguity of identity: one of the key aspects of my depictions of the human figure was that although they are nude, they lack obvious gender signifiers: no breasts, no genitalia, no body hair. Although this androgynous quality was not always adhered to, I was very aware of how the bodies are perceived. By removing genitalia, I wanted viewers to look at the bodies in a non-gendered, non-erotic way, to see the body as a symbol, or metaphor upon which a post-feminist queer reading could be projected. By removing something, it makes it more obvious that it’s not there.

I also drew the figures with eyes closed so that the subject matter don’t appear too confrontational to the viewer’s gaze. I positioned their limbs in rather limpid “limp-wristed” articulation, using forms borrowed from Renaissance-era Mannerist art as my reference point, elongating limbs but not to the point of total exaggeration. I wanted the bodies to be languid, open, revealing but still maintaining an air of dignity and mystery. I found that it helped viewers to also view the figures with less prejudice; challenging the nature of their gaze by acquiescing to it.

But the series is not a total rejection of the more scatological aspect of the human body. In the end, after experimenting with different colours, I chose to limit my medium to pencil for the human bodies as a play on my personal “drawing” out of the body. I also limited my colour palette to red and gold pigments, in order to make metaphorical allusions to blood (life) and urine (death), which also helped to unify the works visually. The exhibition, which was staged at Raw Art Space, KL, between December 9 and 15, was titled Red & Gold.

In some of the works, inspired by the use of non-traditional mediums in the Talismans series, I decided to paint some of the human figures, and also a few text-based works, on the back of my HIV medication packaging. I’m still not sure why I did this; perhaps it was an act of reclaiming some of my life back from the virus that has come to define the past two years of my life. These works were the most meaningful to me personally.

The Red & Gold exhibition also served as my farewell of sorts to the city of KL, where I had lived since 2000. It was a bittersweet end. I wished it wasn’t so. But I had to leave for reasons practical, as well as emotional and psychological.

Additional notes: Continuing “Red & Gold”

Since I moved back to Kota Kinabalu in December 2017, I’ve been continuing and expanding on the themes and forms that I explored in the Red & Gold series of works. This includes making new works that use HIV medication packaging. To make the new “Red” paintings, I managed to befriend an HIV/ AIDS outreach officer at the local hospital where my case was transferred who graciously helped me source the additional packaging that I needed.

These new “Red” paintings are slightly larger, and some are painted on packaging for antiretroviral medication that I don’t personally use. I realise that this has changed the intention of the work, which was initially a personal project to come to terms with my HIV status, to become a meditation on broader issues facing the community stricken with the virus.

The process resulted in the four paintings - Ganymede, Atlas, Icarus, and Apollo. I gave the paintings the titles after I finished them, with the reference to Greek mythology because I saw the figures in the paintings as representing archetypal characters — somehow the process of continuing with the series has endowed them with narratives, as bombastic as they may seem, that reference the myths.

Ganymede, desired for his youthful beauty, is abducted by Zeus in the guise of an eagle to Mount Olympus, so that he could be made an immortal cupbearer to the Gods, in addition to becoming an object of Zeus’s lust. Atlas, as punishment for having chosen the losing side of history in the war between the Titans and Olympians, is burdened with carrying the heavens on his back for eternity.

Icarus, the son of the inventor Daedalus, who fell into the sea after daring to fly too close to the sun with his artificial wings in defiance of his father’s advice. And Apollo, the powerful and handsome god of the sun, whose charisma and brilliance barely hid an egoistic, jealous and sometimes vengeful personality.

The fates of these characters and what they symbolise somehow resonated with me because they seemed super tragic, ironic even. Perhaps this is because of my own growing cynicism, but I find it deeply moving as well, because I identify with different aspects of each of their fates and personalities, if only in a fantastic sense.

The reference to Greek mythology is also a nod to the Western classical tradition of venerating Hellenistic ideals of the human figure. I’m on the fence on this: while I appreciate the perfect naked sculptures of antiquity, I also think the veneration of them sometimes crosses the line into a pointless ideation of something that is no longer human.

So: the work as I see it is deeply tragicomic. I try to make it as aesthetically pleasing as I can, but materially it is made up of a symbolic artifact of human folly: it is not a cure for there is none. The only way to redemption as I see it is to acknowledge the duality of life: darkness and light, life and death, etc.